


keep the earth below my feet

by Eclaire-de-Lune (RoyalHeather)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, non-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 15:29:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4671791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoyalHeather/pseuds/Eclaire-de-Lune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>but what if, they cry, those hearing the stories of the freelancers. but what if - but what if he lived - what if they took delta from him and left the body - what if carolina found him instead -</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep the earth below my feet

_but what if, they cry, those hearing the stories of the freelancers. but what if - but what if he lived - what if they took delta from him and left the body - what if carolina found him instead -_

 

“York,” she says.

He rips his helmet off, gasping, on all fours on the ground. “Where is he - where’s -”

“ _York_.”

“I can’t find him, I can’t find D -” and he’s retching, nothing but bile coming up, and Carolina crouches beside him with a hesitant hand on his back. This is a distress so intensely personal that she feels like an intruder just by being there. “We gotta -” He scrambles unsteadily to his feet, eye wide and frantic. “We have to find him, we have to get him back, we -”

 

Numbers, he has problems with. “What’s thirty-nine times two?” Carolina asks him, testing.

“I - sixty-eight?” says York. “No, that’s not right - forty. No. Eighty. No. Eighteen? No, that can’t - that can’t be right either -”

He’s missing words, too. “It’s just over there,” he tells Carolina one day, as they’re out and hunting, always a step behind Wash. “Just beyond that - that -”

York’s pointing at a cliff, so she assumes that’s what he’s talking about, but Carolina waits for him to say it. “It’s -” York pauses, visibly frustrated, and Carolina realizes with horror that he’s genuinely forgotten the word, he can’t come up with it - “That - that thing, the rock thing, it’s tall, I know the word, I know it, why can’t I - why -“

“ _York_ ,” she says, firmly, because all that’s happening is he’s working himself up more. “York, stop, you’re not helping -”

He draws himself up, and Carolina can’t see his expression behind the helmet but she doesn’t need it to read his clenched fists, his rigid shoulders.

“Just stop,” she says, and somewhere, from the back of her mind, floats up the word _aphasia_ and the knowledge that the more he pushes, the worse he’ll make it. “You can’t force it. Just stop, and breathe, and think about something else.”

 

At first she thinks he’s just joking around, playing dumb. But after he forgets where they’re headed for the third time in a row, after the fifth consecutive morning where he wakes in a panic because he doesn’t know where he is, Carolina realizes that amnesia is not just a thing that takes someone’s past from them. It has a just as ugly cousin that keeps York from recording the present.

The truth is, when they (the Meta or Wyoming or whoever it might have been) ripped Delta out of him, it left long gaping wounds in his mind, ugly gashes with nothing left to fill them but the scar tissue. Things Carolina hadn’t even considered are problems now. When York had Delta to compensate, his broken eye wasn’t an issue. But now he has no depth perception, limited spacial awareness - he stumbles constantly, moves with either heartbreaking caution or infuriating recklessness, depending on whether he wants to keep himself from running into things or not.

 

They’re in a cave, stripped out of armor down to the bodysuits, a small fire casting flickering shadows on the wall. Carolina is so weary it has seeped into her bones, never to leave, her head and shoulders heavy with what feels like a thousand years.

York leans towards Carolina, firelight glimmering opaque on his skin and bad eye. “ ‘Lina,” he says softly, face so close to hers.

“Don’t,” she says - she’s so tired, God, she’s so damn tired. “I can’t - not right now…”

He doesn’t say anything, but puts a hand on her knee. Carolina lets it rest there, because the weight of it feels good, and his thumb brushes over leg in a slow, repeated gesture. She shouldn’t be allowing this - something rational and indignant in her brain is protesting - but all objections seem faint and far away. York’s hands are warm, and his touch is nice, and she needs someone steady to lean on…

She shifts her weight over slowly, rests her head on his shoulder. York is still for a moment, and then he resumes the gentle stroking of her leg. Behind Carolina’s back, his other hand travels up and rests on her head, and then he slowly starts to massage her scalp.

It’s… Carolina doesn’t even have words to adequately express how good it feels. Like he’s reaching inside her, finding every string of worry and anxiety and stress that’s stretched breaking-point tight and gently untying each one, saying, _here, i got this, let me take that for you, don’t worry about it…_

That night they sleep in each other’s arms. Sleep, and nothing more.

 

She’s the one who hears it on their stolen transponder, so she has to be the one to tell him. “York… North’s dead.”

He doesn’t react, just stares blankly at the wall of their temporary hideout. “How?” he asks at last.

“The Meta got to him,” says Carolina.

York still doesn’t move from where he’s seated, doesn’t look away from the wall, but a painful transformation is happening on his face, the lines deepening and hardening, muscles tightening, skin reddening, until he looks like he’s carved out of red-hot steel, anger and grief fused into one. “York -”

“It’s not fair,” he says, vicious. “It’s not fair, it should have been me -”

“No -”

“It’s not _fair_!” he snarls, turning to her - his fists are clenched, tendons in his arms standing out like wires, shoulders trembling. “It should have been me - why wasn’t it me -”

Carolina does not know how to comfort but she does the best she can, scrambling forward and pulling York into a clumsy embrace, and he’s shaking all over and his fingers dig into her arms. “It should have been me,” he keeps saying, face pressed hot and wet against her neck.

“Shhh -”

“It should have been me - why wasn’t it me -” he coughs and chokes, a ragged approximation of a sob “- I wish it was me -”

 

“You need to stop!” yells York, the rain pouring down so loudly Carolina can barely hear him. “Carolina, please, you’re not helping anyone by driving yourself into the ground -”

“It’s not about me!” she shouts back. Even with the water-repellant coating her visor’s getting clouded, and she wipes it off impatiently. “This is about trying to find Wash, and Delta, and anyone else who might still be out there -”

“You think I don’t know that?” York tears off his helmet, expression torn between anger and desperation. “But this won’t help, at the pace we’re going, we’ll just get ourselves killed -”

“I can do it,” growls Carolina.

“I never said you couldn’t!” York shouts, water flattening his hair to his head. “Carolina -“

Her visor’s all water-spotted and fogged up and she rips her helmet off impatiently, gasping at the sudden deluge of water on her face. “ _What_?”

He just runs fingers through his waterlogged hair helplessly and Carolina wants to grab York, to shake him, to scream in his face because things aren’t okay and they should be, why isn’t he making things better, why won’t he fix things -

“What?” she yells at him again. “Don’t just stand there, say something -”

York grabs Carolina and kisses her, his stubbly beard scratching her for a brief second before she breaks away and slaps him. Staggering, York puts a hand up to his jaw. “ ‘Lina -”

“Why,” she gasps, and the water on her face is mostly rain but might also be tears, “why couldn’t you just let it go, why can’t you just let me go, I’m not worth it -”

“ ‘Lina, ‘Lina, ‘Lina,” he says, and he’s holding her as much as he can with the armor in the way, and the rain is everywhere, pouring down her head and neck, soaking her hair, and Carolina seizes York’s face and pulls him down into a kiss.

York inhales, crushing her against him, and he’s gripping her tight and they’re kissing wet and furious and desperate and God, the throaty catch of his breath makes things deep inside her ache. “ ‘Lina,” he whispers, hoarse, and kisses her again, tongue warm against hers.

 

They both have nightmares, though generally not at the same time. York comes out of his with a gasp, rigid and shaking, beaded with sweat. Carolina cries out in her sleep (or so he tells her), and when she wakes it’s a fifty-fifty whether she’ll strike York or curl into his chest.

Neither of them are getting enough sleep, strung-out and wiry with dark circles under their eyes, and sometimes Carolina wonders if she’ll ever feel rested again.

 

They are in a meadow, by a mountain, somewhere. The sunshine is warm on Carolina’s hair, on her face, and York’s unhelmeted head rests in her lap. With bare fingers she rubs slow circles in his temples, doing her best to ease away a persistent migraine. She gets headaches, too, but they are never debilitating and usually pass quickly. But then again, Eta and Iota had been removed with surgical precision.

“ ‘S nice,” mumbles York. With his eyes closed, his eyelashes look very long against his tanned skin. Carolina doesn’t say anything, just continues gently massaging his temples while the wind flutters through the grass, kicking up the faint scent of flora.

 

“You did _what_ ,” says York.

“I’m sorry,” says Wash, and he’s very different from the boy Carolina once knew, because although there is sympathy in his voice for York there is not a shred of regret. “But it was the only way to stop the Meta.”

“You killed D!” roars York, and leaps at him.

Carolina leaps to hold him back, but York throws her off and then he’s on top of Wash, pummeling him mercilessly with both fists. “York!” Carolina shouts, and grabs him in a headlock from behind, pulling him back. “York, stop -”

He snarls in animal rage, struggling furiously, but Wash is already on his feet and scrambling away. There’s a crack in his visor. “I’m sorry, York, I really am,” he says. “But there was no other way.”

York stops fighting Carolina’s grip and just stares up at Wash, chest heaving. “Get out of here,” he says, dangerously quiet. “While you still can.”

Wash hesitates, looking to Carolina. She does not blame Wash for his decision, but she doesn’t have to be happy about it either. “Go,” she says, voice neutral.

He runs off, leaving York slumped in Carolina’s arms. “I’m sorry,” she says softly.

Sitting up, York pulls off his helmet and lets it fall to the ground, head hanging and arms resting limp on his knees. Carolina removes her own helmet, puts an arm around York’s shoulders. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t lean into her touch, just sits there.

 

“Maybe there’s a chance,” he says frantically, eyes burning. “We don’t know - Wash could have been wrong - maybe D survived -”

“York, you know that’s not true -”

“We have to find out,” he says, as if lit on fire.

“The more you hope the more it’s going to hurt when you’re let down -”

 

The facility is dead, Maine’s body gone. “He’s still out there,” says York, with desperate conviction. “D’s still alive, Carolina, he has to be -”

There’s nothing she can say.

 

The realization that Delta’s gone, that it’s true, it’s real, does not come in one heavy moment. It is a slow creeping thing that Carolina sees in the way he moves a little slower each day, grows a little paler, fights a little  weaker. It’s like watching someone gradually succumb to an illness, and it hurts in ways she’d never imagined possible.

 

“York, you have to eat.”

 

“York, talk to me.”

 

“York, _please_.”

 

“York,” she snarls at him, and when he slowly turns to her the dead look in his eyes just makes her angry. She has not put this much effort, this much blood and bullets and energy, into keeping themselves alive just for him to waste away like this. “York, snap out of it, you can’t -” _get over it_ , she wants to say, but even she’s not that heartless “- you can’t go on like this -”

“Easy for you to say,” he retorts, but without conviction. “You never cared about Eta and Iota, they were just tools -”

“No, but I care about you!”

Her exclamation reverberates off the concrete walls of the bunker, and in the silence following it she thinks she sees a flicker of life in York’s eyes, the first one for days. It’s the first time either of them has said it out loud in words, and all she can feel right now is a strange mixture of heartbreak and rage.

“I…” he says, hoarse.

“Just - just do _something_ , goddammit, be angry, be sad, _fight_ -” She’s kneeling beside him now, his face in her hands, and York’s looking at her with what might be the ghost of an expression. “Just don’t give up, don’t do _this_ , whatever the hell this is, I can’t take it, I won’t watch it, I won’t let you do this -”

He exhales shakily, tears in his good eye. “I can’t…”

“Yes, you can, dammit, York, I know you, I know you can!”

With a sigh, York tips his head into her hands, eyes closed, and Carolina strokes her thumbs over his cheekbones - Jesus, they’re like razor blades. His short beard scratches her palms, the curve of his lower lip worn and chapped. There’s a couple of tiny freckles on his right eyelid.

“If I did,” he says, eyes still closed, every word sounding like it costs him an incredible effort, “what would - where would we go from here?”

The answer comes to Carolina like a flash of vicious lightning, so clear she can’t believe she didn’t see it before. “We find the Director, and make him pay.”

 

It takes them years.

 

He’s sitting in front of a screen, watching that video of Mom over, and over. In the doorway, York puts a hand Carolina’s shoulder, a silent check to see if she’s okay.

Carolina nods at him, once. Walks into the room with York shadowing her. “Hello, Director,” she says.

“Hello, Agent Carolina,” he responds. “Would you like to watch this file with me?”

“No.”

“Play it again, F.I.L.S.S.,” he says, and she does, and it’s almost sickening, this pathetic attempt to reclaim what’s been gone for so long, like watching a moth in its final, feeble death throes. “I just need to watch this,” he says, and he sounds broken. Not even sad, just broken. Malfunctioning. “I think I have a way… a way to bring her back right this time.”

Carolina is very, very glad to have York beside her, especially when he takes her hand and gives it a brief squeeze. “The authorities are hunting you now,” she says. “If I found you, they will too.”

“I just need a bit more time.”

“No,” says York, dropping Carolina’s hand and walking forward. The Director starts, looking at him in surprise. “You’re out of time. You have to answer for what you did.”

“Hello, York,” says the Director, recovering. “You came all this way just to see me?”

“Someone’s got to hold you accountable, Director,” says York, voice crawling with menace. “For what you did to me, to D, to Carolina - to all of us.”

The video is still playing, Mom young and smiling and eternally faded, a ghost. Carolina takes her helmet off and looks down at the Director… and then he takes his glasses off and looks up at her.

He really does look sad now, she thinks, and she realizes that all her rage is gone. She can’t be angry at him, not any more. She only feels a deep and sorrowful pity.

“ ‘Lina…” says York, quietly.

Leaning down, Carolina kisses Leonard Church on the forehead. “Just a bit more time,” he says, as she straightens.

“Come on, York,” says Carolina. “We’re leaving.”

“After all this?” says York, incredulous. “We came all this way -”

“I know,” says Carolina. “But there’s… It won’t bring them back, York. It won’t fix anything.”

York sighs heavily, shoulders drooping. “I know.”

Carolina turns to leave, but as she does, Leonard puts his arm out and stops her. “Agent Carolina?”

“Yes, Director?”

“Would you be so kind as to leave me your pistol?”

Her heart sinks like a thousand pounds of lead, but she won’t let him see it. Instead, she mutely pulls her pistol out of its hip holster and places it on the desk. “Thank you, Carolina,” he says quietly.

This is it - her last chance to say something to him - and all she can manage is, “Goodbye, sir.”

York has a light hand at her elbow as they start to leave the room, but before they go, Leonard says, “Carolina?”

She stops, not even sure what she’s hoping to hear but knowing it’s something, anything - “Yes?”

“You were my greatest creation.”

It falls horribly, twistingly flat, because she is not just his _creation_ , she is not just one of his digital toys. “No,” she says. “I’m much more than that,” and leaves.

She and York walk down the endless halls in silence, and not until they’re outside, in the fading autumn sunlight, does either one of them say something. “I’m sorry,” says York quietly.

Carolina just looks at him, and then he’s pulling her into a hug, or as much of one as he can manage with their bulky armor, and she finds herself holding tight to him like he’s her only lifeline. “Hey,” he says softly. “Hey. I’m here.”

Shaking, Carolina grips him tight, staring over his shoulder at nothing, waiting every second to hear a gunshot, even though she knows the sound will never travel through the concrete and metal walls. “Hey,” says York again, and Carolina intensifies her hold until it must be hurting him, even through the armor. “I got you.”

 

“Now what?” says York.

“I don’t know,” sighs Carolina. “Let’s go shoot something.”

 

Sex is rare, given their uncertain lifestyle, but when it happens Carolina makes sure to take full advantage of it. On those nights when they do have just each other, Carolina is greedy, taking as much of York as she can get until her lips are raw and stinging from kisses and there are bruises from fingers on both their thighs. Their naked bodies are lean and hungry, York’s ribs like rebar under Carolina’s hands, his muscles like wires.

One hot, pulse-pounding night Carolina is straddling him, York deep inside her. And after they have both come with stifled groans she looks down at him, sweat-damp hair clinging to her face, and says, “I’m not in love with you.”

“Neither am I,” says York.

“And I won’t say I love you, because I don’t mean it the way most people do.”

“I know.” York has one hand resting on her thigh, and the other travels up to gently cup her forearm. “It’s like… I would never say I loved my eyes, or my hands, or my feet. But life without them?” He laughs, bitter. “Goddamn.”

“Yes,” says Carolina. “Like that.”

 

They become mercenaries. It pays the bills.

 

“You saved my life, you know that?” says York one night, as they are sitting side-by-side field stripping weapons.

“When?” says Carolina. “You mean when I knocked you out of the way of that grenade on Reach? Or when I shot up that pirate who had you pinned, or -”

“No, not like that,” says York, separating mechanical parts with a click. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m hella grateful for those too. But… way back when, after I found out D was gone. You saved me.”

“You saved yourself,” says Carolina quietly, focusing on the gun in her hands. “I just provided the spark.”

“Well, I needed that.”

 

“We’re getting too old for this shit,” groans York. “You know what we should do? Get a ranch.”

 

It’s not Old Earth, by any means, but it’s a house with some fields in the middle of nowhere and a handful of animals that apparently are not actually horses, but for all intents and purposes seem to be. After so many years killing things, Carolina finds a strange comfort in taking care of them, in touching the soft muzzle of a horse instead of the hard muzzle of a gun. Their armor is piled in a closet, slowly gathering dust.

She’s going gray, the red in her hair fading quickly into dull silver. York’s got it too, streaks at his temples and silver peppering his beard. Both of them have deep lines in their faces and bad knees from the years of combat. Carolina’s got a shoulder that aches in the mornings and won’t rotate past a certain angle. York has a limp.

He also has issues coming back that he spent years learning to compensate for, motor coordination and depth perception and decision-making all slowly breaking down. The hearing in his left ear is all but gone at this point, too. His memory, as he freely admits, is shit.

There are still nights when one or both of them wakes up with their heart pounding, sure some unseen danger is out there. York keeps a knife under his pillow, and Carolina has a pistol under the mattress. Then there are the mornings where she wakes up and everything hurts, and it takes icyhot packs and aspirin and the knowledge that other living things depend on her for survival to get out of the bed.

“When did we get to be so goddamn old,” she grumbles to York one day.

“Hell if I know,” he says. He sounds tired, but he always sounds tired, and he’s got a hint of a smile. “But I prefer it to the alternative.”

“Yeah,” sighs Carolina. Sometimes she’s still amazed she made it this far.

 

Locals (and by that she means people living within a five-mile radius) are nice enough. There’s the clerk at the grocery store who knows better than to offer to carry out her bags for her, and the group of naive but well-meaning middle-aged women who are very sure that Carolina wants to join their book club.

“You can’t stay on that ranch of yours every night,” one of them says. “You need to socialize!”

“I do socialize,” says Carolina. “I’m talking to you, right?”

Actually, the nights she spends with a shotgun, patrolling the property for not-coyotes to make sure they don’t get the chickens (somehow they have chickens - York doesn’t remember getting them, not that that means much, and Carolina doesn’t either, but they are very much there) are far more entertaining to her. Funnily enough, it’s the teenagers she gets along the best with, ragged kids hanging around after school, trying to steal cigarettes under the misguided conception that it will make them tougher and more cool. At first they’re wary - of course they are, she’s the tough lady who lives on the ranch with that scary one-eyed guy - but slowly she starts making friends. She thinks they appreciate an adult who doesn’t treat them like children and accepts that no way about it, some parts of being a teenager just plain suck.

York is much more personable, having retained just enough of his old charm to ingratiate himself with others. If he ever lives that long, he is absolutely going to be that one old man in the nursing home who hits on every staff member, male or female, just because he can.

 

“You know what,” says York one night, as they’re on the couch in front of the fire. “We forgot to have kids.”

“We did, didn’t we,” says Carolina. “Shit.”

“I don’t really mind.”

“Nah,” she says, leaning into the hard curve of his shoulder. “Me neither.”

They continue sitting in silence, watching the flames crackle on the hearth, York’s fingers tracing slow circles on Carolina’s upper arm. “Hey,” he says, after a while. “Wanna get married?”

Carolina considers. “Sure,” she says. “Why not.”

 

_there was two, a man of bronze and a woman of fire-hardened clay. he worshipped her in silence, because she would accept nothing more or less than what she really was. their lovemaking was hot skin and heavy breathing in the dark, and when she ran her fingers down the lines of his many scars it was with merciless love. they were a grasping and a taking, a pushing and a pulling, each struggling to carry the weight of the world for the other. and when he proposed, there were no sweet gestures, no diamond ring or getting down on one knee. it was a simple statement of fact, a formalization of the extant truth that they had molded themselves around the other, like two molten metals flowing slowly into each other until all there was was one solid alloy._

 


End file.
